Alex WellersteinVerified account

Yeah. I see this all too often unfortunately. Another sad thing I see is people reducing the Progressive Era to eugenics. There might be some other lessons to draw on from that period like . . . I don’t know, food safety and anti-trust.

That sounds great

Sure. What I usually want people to focus on is: what's the locus of change? if it's individuals, and not the "gene pool" or population, then it's probably not eugenics. it still might be bad. but I feel like "eugenics" ought to mean, "deliberate attempts to change populations."

If it's not deliberate, and not aiming at populations, I might say that the program "has the same effect as a eugenics program" but I'm not sure I'd necessarily call it eugenics qua eugenics. But I know not all see it this way! :-)

An example from my paper on sterilizations in California is a doctor who sterilized because he thought it would give therapeutic benefits to patients. Is that eugenic sterilization? I don't think so — he wasn't trying to change the gene pool.

Did it have effects (mass sterilizations of the poor, for example) that are equivalent to those we'd expect from a eugenic sterilization program? Definitely. Which for me is the interesting point. You can be "not a Nazi" but still get "Nazi-like" results with some policies.